Are you strongly retaining the synthesizer? You should be holding the synthesizer in a property at least until it finishes speaking the utterance.
Also there are some problems with AVSpeechSynthesizer which may or may not be related to your issue:
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/737685
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/730639
Topic:
Media Technologies
SubTopic:
Audio
Tags: